


every awful word.

by clickingkeyboards



Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Autism, Autistic Character, Autistic Daisy Wells, Best Friends, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Misunderstandings, meltdowns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:48:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26000653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: After the Fallingford Scandal, the teasing at Deepdean gets under Daisy’s skin and she breaks in the most frighteningly peculiar way.It was terrifying, to see somebody so perfect snap into a thousand pieces and then tiredly fall back together in a terrifically odd way.
Relationships: Daisy Wells & Hazel Wong
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	every awful word.

“Daisy, what’s wrong?” I asked, confused by the complete franticness with which she had dragged me up to the dorm, only to suddenly sit down on her bed and not move the slightest bit, staring straight ahead as if I wasn’t there at all. “Daisy? Daisy, are you okay?

I sat on my bed opposite her, staring at her frozen form and wondering if this was some sort of test for the Detective Society. And, if it was, wondering whether or not I was failing. “Daisy, you need to tell me what’s wrong.”

“Stop talking, Watson,” she growled, the wrinkle at the top of her nose appearing. “Be quiet.”

“Daisy, tell me what’s wrong!” I demanded, leaning forward to try and peer into her eyes.

“STOP TALKING!” Daisy screamed, her hands flying up to cover her ears. Instead of the pretty spots of colour high up on her cheeks that I am so used to, her entire face was red and pink in blotches, contorted in invisible agony.

For a moment, I worried that she had been poisoned.

“Daisy!” I shouted in shock, feeling my heart speed up in my chest as panic took hold, flushing my face and making me sweat all over. Rushing to her bed, I grabbed her shoulder and tried to make her look at me, to make her  _ tell  _ me what was wrong. “Daisy, are you all right?”

She looked up to her, and her eyes were  _ so  _ blue, and  _ so  _ afraid. Afraid of  _ me _ . Then, just before I could snatch my hands away from her, she growled out a curse word and turned her head, harshly biting my hand that rested on her cheek. “DON’T TOUCH ME!” she shrilled in hysterics, louder than I have ever heard her before.

Suddenly, she was bellowing, groaning and rocking back on her bed, slamming her head back against the mattress and beating her fists against her head, as if she was trying to knock out every awful word that had been said over dinner. 

“Daisy!” I shouted, though I didn’t reach out. The bite on my hand was what made me realise that, for the first time in as long as I couldn’t remember, Daisy didn’t want to hug me. “What can I do?  _ Daisy _ .”

She moaned at the sound of my voice, her hands covering her ears as she shook her head from side to side, hitting her head against the bed over and over. “Hazel,” she managed, drawing it out in a groan. “Hazel.  _ Hazel _ .”

I couldn’t do anything.

Forget murderers, forget midnight chases, forget dead bodies. The most terrifying thing I have ever experienced is being helpless at Daisy’s bedside, watching helplessly as she screamed and thrashed. The sounds she made didn’t sound  _ right _ , and they made my head feel quite numb and apart from my body with just how strange they were. Crying and calling and shouting in the oddest voices, as if she was not entirely herself. However, I knew somewhere inside me that I was giving myself the easy way out if I believed this was not her: if I pretended that this was not Daisy, I didn’t have to  _ mind _ . But it  _ was _ Daisy, another, more raw, honest and true side of her where everything comes out, and I had to get used to this side of Daisy too. Even if it hurt my heart to see.

The moaning was the worst part of it. It was  _ awful _ , and I felt like crying as I listened to her. Even as she pulled her plaits so hard I thought her hair would come out, I couldn’t reach out and pull her away, stop her ruining her lovely curls. All I could do was sit and watch as she tired herself out, stare as her movements reduced to rocking her head side to side and fluttering her fingers against the bedsheets, where they were splayed out.

“Do… do… do do… du… do…” she said quietly, somewhere between a whisper and a groan. It sounded like a song, only her voice wasn’t strong enough to sing. “Do… do… do do… du… do…” It seemed to soothe her as she sang, the wrinkle at the top of her nose smoothing out and the pink and red fading from her cheeks. Even though she was slick with sweat all over, in more of a state than I have ever seen her, she looked peaceful.

Carefully, though I’m not sure what I was being careful of in particular, I sat down at her feet, my feet dangling off the edge of her bed. “Daisy?” I whispered, as quietly as possible. I felt afraid; I had never seen Daisy like this before, not even when I told her at Fallingford that her father had to be guilty. It was terrifying, to see somebody so perfect snap into a thousand pieces and then tiredly fall back together in a terrifically odd way. “Are you all right?”

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t groan at the sound of my voice. Instead of answering me, she carried on with her peculiar little mantra, still drumming her fingers and rocking her head slowly side to side. “Do… do… do do… du… do…”

I had an idea. If singing in such an odd fashion made her feel better, maybe I could join in? She does like it when people do what she says. “Do… do… do do… du… do…” I tried hesitantly, and Daisy – to my astonishment – giggled.

We sat together like that, me sat at Daisy’s feet with my hands folded in my lap, Daisy laying on her back on her bed and drumming her fingers, shaking her head, both of us mumbling, “Do… do… do do… du… do…” until Daisy opened her eyes again.

“Hazel, thank you.”

I was quite astonished, and suddenly couldn’t talk.

“That would have been awful without you there.”

It was exactly what she said to me at Fallingford.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” I said to her. “You should rest.”

“How?” she replied, quite rudely.

Ridiculously, I was relieved. “We can tell them that you dragged me up here because you knew you were about to be ill. So you’ve spent the last… however long being ill in the bathroom, and now you need to go to the San to recover because you’re exhausted.”

She stared at me with very blue, searching eyes. “Hazel Wong, are you encouraging a  _ lie _ ?”

Even more ridiculously, I burst laughing.

* * *

Nurse Minn lets me use her telephone, even though she had looked at us askance when Daisy and I stumbled into the San with our fumbling excuse.

“Excuse me, may I talk to Bertie Wells?” I said, very conscious of my accent as I answered the very serious and very British man at the other end of the phoneline. “It’s about his sister.”

“WELLS!” he barked, as if shouting across from a hall telephone into a dining hall. For a moment, I pictured Eton as a mirror image of Deepdean, only much lovelier. “Someone’s on the phone for you about your sister!”

“Hello?” he said, and it struck me oddly that I hadn’t heard him speak without choking on tears since before Stephen was arrested. “Daisy?”

“No. It’s me, Hazel.” My hand was slick with sweat as I held the receiver, and my knees were wobbling. I had to sit down. “Something happened with Daisy. Don’t worry! She’s… she’s quite alright now. But I didn’t know who else to call, and I am so confused.”

With a heavy sigh, he asked, “What happened?”

“At dinner, everybody was making nasty comments about… Fallingford, about you and your family.” I had never been more careful with what I was talking about in all my life. The Wells family was walking on eggshells in every conversation. “Clementine was flashing around her magazine, with tonnes and tonnes of articles about it. Daisy was prettily unconcerned and pretended not to hear it all, but she started acting really odd.”

“Oh. I think I know what this is.  _ Rats _ . Continue?”

More confused than ever at his peculiar knowledge of something I was clueless about, I continued. “Well, she started drumming her fingers, which she never does, and she kept smoothing down her skirt. She was still making her clever and sharp comments, so I thought she was all right. I noticed that she was trying to listen to everything at once, which she usually does easily, but it made her really confused and... distressed, I would say. She put her fork in her glass and accidentally swept the coffee pot over, and it went all over the table, and she started pulling at her plaits. Then she suddenly jumped up and grabbed me and dragged me all the way up to our dorm, and then she just sat there.” I swallowed hard, feeling like I was about to deliver the most awful news in the world. The image of Daisy staring up at me in fear was haunting me when I closed my eyes, no matter how hard I tried to shake it. I tried rocking back and forth, thinking that it might help me if it calmed down Daisy, but it only made my head feel wishy-washy.

“What happened then?” Bertie asked softly, and he didn’t sound furious.

“I kept asking her what was wrong, but she screamed at me to stop talking, and when I touched her, she… she  _ bit me _ . Then she started groaning and shouting and rocking about on her bed, and she kept hitting her head with her fists! It was awful, and I couldn’t do anything. Then she… tired herself out, I think. She was singing and rocking and tapping her fingers again, and she was so  _ exhausted _ . I’ve never seen her like that in my life.” I swallowed hard. “So I took her to the San and we pretended that she’d been sick.”

I took a big, heaving breath, and Bertie mournfully said, “Oh,  _ Daisy _ .”

“What is it?” I asked him.

“There’s something… different about Daisy,” Bertie told me, and I could tell that he was choosing his words carefully. This puzzled me; of course Daisy is different, she’s an excellent detective and a genius with a mind that moves faster than any other in the world.

“I know that. She’s a detective.”

“No, it’s… what makes her overwhelmed by things that wouldn’t affect you or me, it’s the same thing that makes her a genius. It works on a give-one, take-one system, whatever Daisy has. She’ll have told you that I’m not as clever as her, and that’s why. Whatever it is that makes Daisy tick in her awfully Daisy-ish way, I don’t have it.”

I was puzzled; how could whatever made Daisy scream and groan and pull at her hair be the same thing that solved cases and saved the day? “It’s not genetic?”

“I don’t know, Hazel. Daisy has the same… spark as our uncle, and it’s something I’ve never understood. They click in the most peculiar way.”

“That makes sense a little bit.” The image of Daisy and Uncle Felix twinkling at each other at Fallingford sprung to mind, and I laughed.

“That’s good enough. Daisy has this… mask, I’m sure you’ve noticed it.” I had. It was impossible not to, not when I had seen her prettily accept gifts before screaming and hurling them across the dorm, felt her tackle me at Fallingford when I suggested that Lord Hastings might be guilty, heard the desolate tones in her voice when her parents argued. Daisy’s mask is peculiar, and it fell away in pieces when we met, and I realised how brilliant she was. Only… I hadn’t realised that she still wore it. “She wears it around anybody that isn’t… well, me, our father, and our Uncle Felix. She pretends to be a different sort of girl, the sort of girl that society likes. It makes people pleased, and makes people like her, but it makes her tired. And she’s… taken off her mask in front of you. When distressing things happen, like the teasing, her mask falls away and she has this big… explosion of emotions.”

“Has she always been like this?” I asked. The idea of a smaller but no less fierce Daisy breaking down and screaming hurt my heart.

“For as long as I can remember. This is as Daisy as anything else about her, Hazel, you have to understand that. If you see the secret, clever side of Daisy, you also see the frightened and overwhelmed side of her. And she’s let you in. That’s huge.”

“I’m glad.” I was glad, and sincere.

“Really?”

I wanted to pretend, inside my head, that his surprise didn’t make sense. But it did, of course it did. People don’t like difference, they don’t like the colour of my skin or the shape of my eyes or the way my voice sounds. Why would people treat this secret part of my best friend any differently? I decided not to say that, because Bertie knew all that. “I want to know all of Daisy. Not just the pretty bits. That would be hypocritical.”

“When she was little, it was worse. Bright lights, loud noises, new foods… it was awful. She would just scream and yell and hit her head on things. Then our mother was… she beat Daisy for it, and she realised that she was doing something wrong. Of course, she  _ wasn’t _ , but our mother thought differently.”

“That’s awful.”

“It is. When we were little, we both had a habit of vanishing. We’d climb things and hide in places that nobody would check. Daisy did it far more than me, she’d find these little reading nooks away from the shouting and the bustle of our house, and Hetty and I would lose our heads looking for her. She always liked the quiet places, so she would be up in trees, under the stairs, tucked up on a shelf behind something odd, or up on top of something that the little monkey shouldn’t have been able to reach.”

I chuckled, a little shocked that he called Daisy a monkey; it’s the nickname we have for my littlest sister, May, who is a monkey through and through. “That sounds like Daisy.”

“She once ended up on the roof.”

“She still does that!” I replied in a rush, and he laughed out of sheer surprise.

Once he got back some breath, he laughed out, “Of course the rascal does.” There was a muttering from his end of the phone, and he said, “Blast! Look, I’ve got to go. Call me when you can, let me know if Daisy’s alright. I do worry about her.”

“You can count on me.”

“You have a good head on your shoulders, Hazel Wong.” It was a surprising statement, especially given how hesitant he should be when offering praise about best friends. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied, not knowing what else to say.

I thought he had hung up, but he said, “Oh. Before I forget, there’s one more thing.”

“Hm?”

With an embarrassed sort of chuckle, he started to explain. “Daisy… when she had her explosions when she was little, I would read to her and stroke her hair. Even though she might bite you for trying, I’d give it a go.”

“Um… thank you?”

Laughing aloud, he said, “I’m  _ joking _ , Hazel Wong! But do try it.” Then the line went dead with an odd sort of whine.

* * *

When Nurse Minn sent me up to House to get Daisy’s things for the night, because she was looking ‘pale and peaky, the poor dear’, I chose carefully. I sat by her bedside until Nurse Minn sent me to bed (at  _ eleven _ , which felt gloriously daring and grown-up), and the only words Daisy spoke to me were, “I’m so  _ tired _ , Watson, but my brain has never been more awake in my life.”

So I took out her plaits and turned away while she changed, and then I stroked her hair while reading her  _ Death on the Nile _ , and she didn’t say a word.


End file.
